Coming to America

The year was 1980. Our plane had landed from St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands to Miami Florida. We were here, we finally made it as American citizens. My mother and my sisters each had their bags with them as we left the airport. My mother was frantic and afraid, she came to this country with $3000 and her brand new U.S. Visa in her pocket, and no idea what to do with herself and her four children. She knew then, that she could no longer ponder on help coming from her native St. Lucia. No one was going to help her or us. She did think for a moment what her father and mother would have to say about her actions. A recently divorced woman struggling to raise her four children in 1980 seemed like a large hurdle back then.

We had walked for what seemed to be hours until someone told her where we could find a cheap motel. And we found ourselves at that motel for a bit of a while. My sisters watched television and ate the fruits that my mother left for them while she scrubbed toilets and cleaned rooms to make ends meet for us. This was a very temporary fix while she figured out how to get some form of government assistance. It didn't last long that motel with the weird 70's wood paneling and thick cheap carpeting. Before we knew it, we were at a house in Hollywood Florida.  I remember we arrived in that roach infested house but we were happy. We clung close to each other because no one else really understood our island dialect.

We were a family back then, my mother, my sisters and myself. We were dirt poor and going to school, but the poor people looked out for each other back then. Pretty quickly, other immigrants took a fondness to us. The Cubans, the Haitians, Jamaicans, and quite a few other islanders were there as well. All leaving behind their home islands to start over here in America. I did reminisce quite often of St. Croix. I did miss the warm waters and the sandy beaches. I missed running up and down grassy green hills and eating mango off of the trees with the other children. But here we were, in America in the dusty streets of the ghettos of Hollywood Florida.

This country takes something from you to make you "conform" to it. No don't appreciate nature, worship our God in a book. No it isn't right for you to wash yourself in the rain, that's not how we do it in America. You can't just catch crabs and eat fresh food, you have to go to a grocery store. I felt this compelling crushing force to make us try to forget who we are to fit in. I miss St. Croix, I miss bonding with nature and being free in the open winds. It is the core of who we are as a shamanistic tribe. So many African based cultures have long forgotten who they are for the sake of the complexity and the technology and fame of America.